May 26, 2019

Ross Douthat On The Unifying Fantasy Of The Left

Normally Ross Douthat tries to engage his Upper West Side readership with calm and sweet reason. Overcome, perhaps, by the martial memories of Memorial Day, he is now opting for a truth bomb which was nearly titled "Why Losers Lose":

How Liberalism Loses

An inflexible agenda and a global retreat.

In Australia a week ago, the party of the left lost an election it was supposed to win, to a conservative government headed by an evangelical Christian who won working-class votes by opposing liberal climate policies. In India last week, the Hindu-nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, won an overwhelming electoral victory. And as of this writing, Europeans are electing a Parliament that promises to have more populist representation than before.

The global fade of liberalism, in other words, appears to be continuing.

Are there lessons to be learned?

The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump’s specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism. If we had a populist president who didn’t alienate so many persuadable voters, who took full advantage of a strong economy, and who had the political cunning displayed by Modi or Benjamin Netanyahu or Viktor Orban, the liberal belief in a hidden left-of-center mandate might be exposed as a fond delusion.

But are these lessons being learned?

That liberal belief may also misunderstand the real correlation of forces in our politics. We had an example this week on our op-ed podcast, The Argument, where my colleague and co-host David Leonhardt interviewed Pete Buttigieg, the Midwestern mayor running for president with promises to build bridges between the heartland and the coasts. Leonhardt pressed Buttigieg on whether that bridge-building might include compromise on any social issues, and the answer seemed to be “no” — in part because Mayor Pete argued that on abortion and guns and immigration most middle Americans already agree with Democrats, that the liberal position is already the common ground.

The strategic flaw in this reading of the liberal situation is that politics isn’t about casually held opinions on a wide range of topics, but focused prioritization of specifics. As the Democratic data analyst David Shor has noted, you can take a cluster of nine Democratic positions that each poll over 50 percent individually, and find that only 18 percent of Americans agree with all of them. And a single strong, focused disagreement can be enough to turn a voter against liberalism, especially if liberals seem uncompromising on that issue.

A pattern of narrow, issue-by-issue resistance is also what you’d expect in an era where the popular culture is more monolithically left-wing than before. That cultural dominance establishes a broad, shallow left-of-center consensus, which then evaporates when people have some personal reason to reject liberalism, or confront the limits of its case.

None of this needs to spell doom for liberals; it just requires them to prioritize and compromise. If you want to put climate change at the center of liberal politics, for instance, then you’ll keep losing voters in the Rust Belt, just as liberal parties have lost similar voters in Europe and Australia. In which case you would need to reassure some other group, be it suburban evangelicals or libertarians, that you’re willing to compromise on the issues that keep them from voting Democratic.

Alternatively, if you want to make crushing religious conservatives your mission, then you need to woo secular populists on guns or immigration, or peel off more of the tax-sensitive upper middle class by not going full socialist.

Liberals need to compromise and prioritize? You see where this is going - "No enemies to the left" implies no compromise with any faction of the right.

But the liberal impulse at the moment, Buttigiegian as well as Ocasio-Cortezan, is to insist that liberalism is a seamless garment, an indivisible agenda that need not be compromised on any front. And instead of recognizing populism as a motley coalition united primarily by opposition to liberalism’s rule, liberals want to believe they’re facing a unitary enemy — a revanchist patriarchal white supremacy, infecting every branch and tributary of the right.

In this view it’s not enough to see racial resentment as one important form of anti-liberalism (which it surely is); all anti-liberalism must fall under the canopy. Libertarianism is white supremacy, the N.R.A. is white supremacy, immigration skepticism is white supremacy, tax-sensitive suburbia is white supremacy, the pro-life movement is white supremacy, anxiety about terrorism is white supremacy … and you can’t compromise with white supremacists, you can only crush them.

Which liberals may do in 2020, because Trump remains eminently beatable.

Well, beating Trump won't be the same as re-taking the Senate and the many GOP governorships, but yes, for the left it would be a start.

But in the long run, the global trend suggests that a liberalism that remains inflexible in the face of variegated resistance is the ideology more likely to be crushed.

"Stop hating, haters" as a response to any and all critics is unlikely to develop into a winning message.

.@ianbremmer now admits that he MADE UP “a completely ludicrous quote,” attributing it to me. This is what’s going on in the age of Fake News. People think they can say anything and get away with it. Really, the libel laws should be changed to hold Fake News Media accountable!

Democrats want to impeach @realDonaldTrump because they don’t have any other message heading into 2020 and they’re scared they can’t beat him at the ballot box.
====================================
President Trump comments:

Donald J. Trump
‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump
3h3 hours ago

Impeach for what, having created perhaps the greatest Economy in our Country’s history, rebuilding our Military, taking care of our Vets (Choice), Judges, Best Jobs Numbers Ever, and much more? Dems are Obstructionists!

Flanders is a right of center province while Wallonia is very much left of center. The Flemings are industrious, financially astute and independent while the Walloons are on the dole mostly having lost most of their industry.

Flanders is in the North, Wallonia in the south. Brussels is in the center and it is the primary support to Wallonia by using the riches of Flanders through taxation to support the Walloons.

The majority of Flemings speak 3 languages: Dutch, French, and English

The majority of Walloons only speak French.

If Flanders was independent of Belgium it would be the 4 wealthiest country per capita in Europe.

I just felt it necessary to correct some misimpressions I saw in earlier comments.

Jackson Lee seems to think the FISA warrants against Papadopoulos, Manafort and Flynn were approved, although we've also seen speculation that they may have been the three rare rejections from the same year.

Usury laws have not been repealed to my knowledge. Trip rate is 30% and is why credit card rates are state based and Iowa allows 29.9%, I think. S. Dakota is 29.6% and the big banks have moved all their credit card operations to those states.

The reason interest rates move higher is not statutory, but the public’s perception that daily costs are moving higher, faster than they’ve prepared for, which is, of course, inflation. The daily costs include the daily cost of money, which is reflected in higher interest rates, the other end of the seesaw of price vs interest rates, the higher the rates are, the lower the price of the underlying security.

When you change the cost of money, by hiking basic short term interest rates aggressively and unexpectedly like Volcker did in the early 80’s, the shock curtails a stair step pricing mentality from setting itself into permanence, or worse, spiraling up to hyperinflation like the Weimar Republic or Venezuela.

Listening to, of all unlikely sources, Little Steven's Underground Garage, last night he said that Memorial Day was begun by iirc a pharmacist in upstate New York to decorate the graves of soldiers killed in the Civil War and that it took years before it spread elsewhere and encompassed all vets.

Rep. Dan Crenshaw tried to do a thread yesterday but didn't connect it properly, so it turned out to be 8 separate posts.

On his Twitter page which I am linking here, he has posted the photos of 8 friends he lost in the war, including personal recollections of their interests or character. It's very touching, and makes you realize that the men we lost are actual human beings, not statistics.

Some enterprising souls with too much time on their hands should use some quotes from The Old and New Testaments, only using them as their own, to get God shadow banned.
I'd suggest the Koran too but advocating the killing of infidels would probably only get you a blue check mark.

That pharmacist in upstate NY was one of many who practiced decorating soldiers or sailors graves going all the way back to the American Revolution. The Civil War sprouted many different "Decoration" Days at various cemeteries, throughout the South and North. I believe it was more formally established, as we know it now, in 1868 by General James Garfield.

Tradition has it that it was the gathering of Civil War Vets at Gettysburg in 1913 (?)that really set the calendar as Decoration or Memorial Day.

It used to be May 30th but Congress changed it to the last Monday in May.

Salvini says there is no "far-right" here, only politics of common sense.

"The real extremists are Merkel, Macron, Soros and Juncker - elites who betrayed and occupied Europe in the name of finance, money, multinationals and uncontrolled immigration." pic.twitter.com/3EolZ7mt5O

Thanks for posting, MM - Melania's dress is lovely and some of the flowers appear to be 3-D.

The fact that the MSM refuses to photograph her and (as far as I know) she's never been on the cover of a magazine (unlike Michelle who was on one almost every week) just exposes them for the petty, hateful people they are.

In re Bart Starr. An interesting clip from Peter King's Football in America column on Starr.

"But I did want him to know how good he was if no one reminded him about it much anymore—his 104.8 career rating in NFL playoff games has never been surpassed in the last half-century by the greatest of the quarterback greats. But he didn’t care."

MM - In my opinion this was among the worst! First of all she is walking off Air Force 1 - not lounging around in her private quarters. I found it highly disrespectful of her position. Notice even her hair had not been fixed. Compare that to Melania who always shows excellent taste - whether the press likes her high heels or not!

I was deeply touched by the concern implicit in the Julian Barnes and David Sanger in New York Times story reporting President Trump’s authorization of Attorney General Barr to declassify the documents underlying the greatest political scandal in American political history — i.e., the Russian collusion hoax. Their concern for national security permeates the story. There it is right at the top, for example, in the lead paragraph:

President Trump’s order allowing Attorney General William P. Barr to declassify any intelligence that led to the Russia investigation sets up a potential confrontation with the C.I.A. It effectively strips the agency of its most critical power: choosing which secrets it shares and which ones remain hidden.

...

Yet Barnes and Sanger somehow overlooked the many cases in which the Times itself stripped the CIA of “its most critical power,” and did so without the color of law. To say the least, previous cases reflect the Times’s casual malice toward national security. Perhaps we should pause over one or two such cases in the hope that we might catch the Times in an introspective mood.

MissM 10:43
I don't usually click on the "fashion" links but that one was nice. I like the photos, they show the Japanese PM's wife is so smiley and friendly. You get an instant liking for her. Though, to be sure, I bet is not too hard to be warm, smiling and welcoming to Melania LOL.

“We have a long tradition of religious tolerance in this country and in fact the religious test clause in the Constitution makes it unconstitutional to impose a religious test on anyone who holds public office,” Barrett said during remarks at the Washington, D.C., campus of Hillsdale College.

“I think when you step back and you think about the debate about whether someone’s religion has any bearing on their fitness for office, it seems to me that the premise of the question is that people of faith would have a uniquely difficult time separating out their moral commitments from their obligation to apply the law,” Barrett added. “I think people of faith should reject that premise.”

After launching his Democratic presidential campaign in late April, the former vice president came out of the gate with a busy schedule, holding events in all four of the states that kick-off the primary and caucus calendar, as well as stops in California. And Biden started and closed that campaign swing with speeches in his native Pennsylvania, which is also a crucial general election battleground state.

But Biden hasn’t held a public campaign event since his large kick-off rally in Philadelphia on Saturday, May 18. Since then, he’s headlined a top dollar fundraiser in Nashville, Tennessee and two more in Florida.

And while a bunch of his rivals for the 2020 Democratic nomination are stumping this holiday weekend, Biden’s off the trail.

“Joe Biden has no public events scheduled,” read a release from his campaign.